The birthdays of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, along with Confederate Memorial Day, no longer would be state holidays under a bill that cleared its first Senate committee Tuesday.

The proposed change to state holidays is the latest of several attempts in the Florida Legislature this year to come to terms with the state’s slave-holding past, even as many people don’t know they are state holidays in the first place.

“When this bill was originally proposed, I talked to my staff and we did a little research and found that there wasn’t a single solitary city or county actually using any of these holidays,” said state Sen. Tom Lee, R-Thonotosassa, chairman of the Senate Community Affairs Committee, where the bill passed 4-2.

Florida has 20 state holidays in statute, including the three pro-Confederate ones. But only eight are actually paid days off for state workers.

The meeting was swarmed with pro-Confederate speakers who called the bill “cultural genocide” and referred to the Civil War as “The War of Southern Independence.”

One speaker called Robert E. Lee “a traditional, Christian white male so hated by the radical left that he must be obliterated from view.”

Another called him “god.”

“I was not surprised, I know there’s a lot of passion about this on both sides,” said the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation. “But I do think it got a little out of control.”

Tom Lee was among the two no votes on the committee.

Did you know that there are 20 state holidays, according to Florida law? Some of them are obvious (Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day), but you might be surprised to learn that Robert E. Lee’s birthday, Jefferson Davis’ birthday and Confederate Memorial Day are also still recognized. South Florida Democrats are pushing to put an end to those three Confederate-related state holidays. Here’s a look at all 20 state holidays. (Note: Public employees only get eight of these holidays off of work, with a ninth paid day off for the Friday after Thanksgiving.)

(Dan Sweeney)

“I got a flood of phone calls from people that were offended by us. They privately celebrate this,” he said. “People are very passionate about this subject, and I thought since it does no substantive harm to have it in statute why offend all these people? I didn’t think the juice was worth the squeeze.”

Although the state holidays bill passed its first committee in either chamber, this could be where it ends. The bill has had no movement in the House, and its next stop in the Senate is the Government Oversight and Accountability Committee, which is led by state Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, a deeply conservative senator who has previously cited his own Confederate ancestry in opposing the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith from the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C.

Baxley voted for the bill after guarantees that the Kirby Smith statue would be removed from the hall and brought to a suitable location in Florida. The statue is one of two that represent Florida in the National Statuary Hall. The other is air conditioning inventor John Gorrie. Under a bill that passed the Senate unanimously last week, Kirby Smith would be replaced by African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune.

The House version of that bill still has one more committee hearing, but the House unanimously approved the construction of a slave memorial on the grounds of the Capitol two weeks ago. The Senate version of the Florida slave memorial bill awaits a vote by the full Senate before going to Gov. Rick Scott to be passed into law.